A BI On IBM i Partnership Blooms

December 3, 2012 Dan Burger

Executives love the idea of business intelligence. The promise is that it can quickly provide dividends, but that rarely happens. Why is that? In IBM midrange shops, the situation is no different than anywhere else. IT departments are understaffed and overworked. It doesn’t take a genius to see that when new projects are added someone has to have the time to implement them. The path to completed projects is often paved by service companies. The recent partnership between Coglin Mill and GEMKO is a good example.

Coglin Mill is has an extract, transform, and load (ETL) tool called RODIN for building data warehouses on the IBM i server. GEMKO Information Group is an IT consultancy group with expertise in IBM Web Query installations. Together they offer a better path to business intelligence implementations that stand an improved chance of getting off the ground quickly, becoming successful, and paying back dividends without being disruptive.

Michael Budzich, director of operations at GEMKO, says it is not difficult to find companies that have been frustrated in their attempts to install and configure IBM’s DB2 Web Query. He believes more companies have achieved successful Web Query implementations by seeking help from experts than those that have managed the project with their own staffs. The reason is mostly due to existing staffs that are at their limits for what they can accomplish, he says.

GEMKO, with five years of Web Query implementation experience, will install, configure, and create an operational business intelligence system in a single day, Budzich promises. The typical scenario, including training and services, can put the project in the hands of the end users within a few days, although some installations will certainly take longer and in certain situations companies prefer that GEMKO continues to maintain and build the BI rather than put that on the internal IT staff.

Alan Jordan, Coglin Mill’s vice president of development, believes DB2 Web Query’s reporting, charts, and mobile capabilities, in addition to GEMKO training and services, makes GEMKO a perfect partner for creating IBM i business intelligence.

Coglin Mill’s RODIN was designed to automate data extract, transform and load (ETL) processes with tools to manage extract exceptions, create business rules, control extract and conversion revisions, and automatically document the processes in an IBM Power System i (IBM iSeries) data repository. RODIN is considered as middleware that helps organize and define databases that are not well designed due to old methodologies, inconsistent application development practices, and sketchy maintenance.

The partnership will introduce GEMKO customers to Coglin Mill and vice versa. Neither IBM, which markets DB2 Web Query, nor Information Builders, which owns the technology on which Web Query is based, are involved in this partnership.

DB2 Web Query is reported to have approximately 50,000 downloads to IBM i shops, but active software licenses are thought to be about 10 percent of that number at best.

There will be a 90-minute webinar Wednesday, December 12, at noon CST titled DB2 Web Query and RODIN: Integrated Business Analysis on IBM i. Guest speakers include Gene Cobb, a DB2 for i technology specialist in the IBM Systems Software DB2 for i Development team in Rochester, Minnesota; Jackie Jansen, the IBM i solutions manager for Information Builders specializing in DB2 Web Query; and Coglin Mill’s vice president of development Alan Jordan. Registration for that event can be completed at this link.